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Adebisi is ''just pure, driven instinct,'' said Mr. ''He has to survive by making everyone think he's on their side.'' O'Reily, the epitome of derailed intelligence, gets his way by setting one inmate against the other.Īdewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje plays Adebisi, a wild-eyed African who rapes another prisoner.

Fontana was also interviewed later by telephone.Īmong his creations is the cunning Ryan O'Reily, played by Dean Winters. Fontana and the actors were interviewed in January as they were filming the new season's shows. The series is filmed in the old headquarters of the National Biscuit Company on West 16th Street in Manhattan where Mr. Fontana strives to find a core of humanity in each. The prisoners of ''Oz'' display an almost limitless capacity for betrayal and for inflicting pain. In one episode he gives communion to an inmate who ate his own mother (and froze his father to save him for Thanksgiving). Wong plays a priest who sometimes seems astonished by the evil he encounters. Kinney said.Īmong the good guys are the well-meaning warden (Ernie Hudson) and the prison psychologist, Sister Peter Marie (Rita Moreno). Now McManus has become ''the prison he was trying to reform,'' Mr. An affair with a tough prison guard, played by Edie Falco of HBO's hit mini-series ''The Sopranos,'' has also failed. Here an idealistic prison administrator, Tim McManus, played by Terry Kinney of the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, believes he can genuinely rehabilitate people. The unit is perpetually bathed in an antiseptic light. It has the latest style in prison design, glass instead of bars, and video cameras for maximum surveillance. ''Oz'' takes place in the Oswald Maximum Security Penitentiary, in an experimental unit the inmates have derisively nicknamed Emerald City. Levinson are in effect glorifying the violence they depict, another critic wrote, in The Village Voice: ''Levinson and Fontana estheticize the material at the same time they're hyping its raw realism.'' ''Ultimately,'' a critic for USA Today wrote, ''the show is as dehumanizing as the prison system it attacks.'' Mr. Others, however, have condemned it for its violence. Crouch wrote, ''is a landmark for the medium.'' The critic Stanley Crouch, writing in The New York Times Magazine, praised it for its ''consistently brilliant acting - some of the best in the history of television.'' The show, Mr. So far ''Oz,'' one of HBO's highest-rated dramatic shows, has received mostly favorable reaction.

There is also a chorus, in the person of a crippled convict, Augustus, played by Harold Perrineau, who narrates episodes from a glass cage. At its best, though, ''Oz'' has elements of Greek drama (including eyes being gouged out). Fontana is really trying as hard as he can.Īt its worst ''Oz,'' which begins its third season on Wednesday looks as if it had been conjured up by adolescent boys trying to gross each other out. If you have to do it, you have to do it as horrifically as it really is.'' And Mr. Fontana, who writes most of the show's episodes and is one of its executive producers, along with Barry Levinson and Jim Finnerty. ''The problem with TV violence, it's a lie,'' said Mr. Is there nothing Tom Fontana won't depict on his HBO prison series, ''Oz''?